I’m hesitant to set my novel in 2040. People would predict life to be so robotic and advanced. But I’d still want ordinary schools, normal transportation but a hint of dystopia that’s why I picked the latter year. Should I change it to 2030?

Go read any science fiction book written in the 70s or so about the “distant year 2000.” 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind.

Bless their hearts, they had such high hopes for us. As one song put it, “They never knew the challenge we'd be facing was code we'd key-punched forty years before.”

2040 seems like it's close enough we'd still have most of the same transportation we have now (which is mostly the same as it was in 2000), but far enough away for your dystopia to start to set in.

Actually, that's the setting for one of my time travel stories, that I originally wrote back in like 2012, and I don't think I changed much, just made it a bit dystopian myself. The story centers around whether AI counts as sentient. So you do you.